I tried it a couple of times - hated it for "mainstream" use, but its handy for the odd spot build. The AI uses it a lot, particularly in the colony rush/early game

Regards
Zy

I generally avoid it, as I share Mumble's view on interest. I can indeed be useful in certain situations. Namely, getting one of the 'one per galaxy' type items. It's very satisfying finding out that the AI is about to finish one, and then swooping in and taking it out from under it's nose.

Too bad real-life politicians haven't learned to do this

Start a game in cheat mode - and watch the spread of AI ships relative to time (use control-u to reveal map to watch them). No way do you get that many ships out the dock in that time frame with only a 3000bc starting bank, without leasing.

The other indicator is their economy, watch the Economy, research and production graphs, they will flat line very quickly within a few game months, happens at the same point on each game. They stay flatlined until their population grows to build the cashflow. You'll get an intial fast peak, then booom economy went as they expanded very quickly. Sitting there are a dozen planets colonised.

Its one of the reasons you need to "hang in there" in early colony rushes, keep an eye on the graphs, once they flatline, you have a clear run for while whilst they recover from initial expenditure.

As a seperate (not lease related) issue, their population then does not grow as fast as yours due to the early "mutilation"/heavy use. Watch for the second indicator of pressure release, happens around a game year in or so. When the second wave of AI colonisers start to slow because they have run out of population - the ships will suddenly look very small, click on them and you'll see "68 colonists" - or whatever as being on board. Once you see a couple of those you know the second "pause" is about to begin and you get a breather.

Regards
Zy

I'd agree with the notion of avoiding debt in general but using it occasionally and very carefully. Seems good in real life and the game. One good game reason I haven't seen mentioned yet is wanting to do a mass upgrade of ships without taking the over-20k penalty for several turns.

I'm very interested by this notion of looking for "payback time" for the rival civs' use of heavy leasing. I've got one fresh game at about turn 30, but it's on an immense map and I've only just met the Drengin, so not much to see on the Timeline tab.

Cheat mode - never thought about using it to get insight into the underlying game mechanics. Good way to do it!

I have seen the AI throw out lots of colony ships early on in most games and I've scratched my head and asked myself "How they do dat?". BUT, if they are buying their ships on credit, why didn't that show up on the End of Game Summary???

As an aside on "How they do dat?", I recently had a TA game with everything set to random which produced a galaxy with everything very rare. I was working on my 2nd colony ship when a Thalan constructor (no less) came zooming through my region and went into the fog behind me. As soon as I was able, I sent a ship down the same path the Thalan took and, sure enough, way out there and DEAD CENTER on that path, was a Military Resource which (of course) was now owned by the Thalans. That bugs me.

Not tried it, might work.

Unrelated (as such) observation. The flat-lining occurs with the Manufacturing and Research graphs, and to a lesser extent but still there with the production graph. The economy graph is usually - as such - unchanged, although that's not always been the case. Its possible the AI is "turning off" the lot to focus on pure cash generation, which would tie in with a bust economy that needs to recover.

Regards
Zy

Interesting, could be option based. I play immense, all abundant, crippling, random minors, eight opponents, standard CPU, Federalists. I've found this even with the other GalCiv versions on Gigantic.

I'll start a new game and get a screen shot.

Regards
Zy

I hadn't played enough TA to see if they have altered their strat enough to avoid the crash, but all the other versions definately have it. On the highest levels they do hold out a little longer before killing their prod/res.

Sorry to necromance this thread, but here are a few thoughts of mine.

I've only recently purchased this game (EU version) and wondered about the way you all seem to avoid rushing production. In Civ, there's a large premium on turn advantage. In particular, there seems to be a very strong tendency to sacrifice population for construction (the power of the whip).

I wonder why there's such a negative view on leasing here. A priori (that is, without much experience on the game itself), I'd say that leasing is a splendid way to gain turn advantage over the competition. Of course, you should not be blindly rushing your production with leasing, but money now is usually worth more than money later, even if the total cost of a lease is higher than a direct-buy option. Postponing payment should be a good strategy if your income will have grown more due to this purchase than the inflated price due to leasing, or if the money otherwise spent on direct purchase is better spent in the meantime on paying for research.

My point is not very clear in this post, but perhaps you can shoot down this line of reasoning by using arguments from the economy model. Again, this is an a priori thought on how one could or should use leasing to get a net gain instead of the current state of opinion on leasing ("Leasing is bad, mkay?").

I understand that's it's easy to crash the economy. It's easy enough to do this without leasing in any case

But once you knwo what you're doing (which can still take some time), will leasing not become much more viable? For two reasons: if you can lease your way into winning, then who cares about your economy (this assumes a small enough map or endgame situation where you're able to finish the game before the pain that comes from lease costs start to matter). And if you can postpone payment to a moment when you can afford it, then leasing can be the correct decision if you can gain what you need that much faster by a greater quantity.

In the first case, you're sacrificing your long term viability completely because there is no long term (i.e. all or nothing play). It may be cheesy, but it should work in certain circumstances.

In the second case, you're sacrificing part of your mid term income for a short term gain. The assumption is that without the lease, a rush is not affordable (or you're not able to afford other expenses). The expectation is that the short term gain is great enough to offset the mid term loss of income. An extreme example would be longterm leases on several colony ships on a map with several high quality planets in a border region and direct purchase of the colony ships would be prohibitively expensive.

Total cost is certainly not the only or perhaps not even the main consideration in leasing. The moment of payment is perhaps a much more important consideration for leasing.

I think once I've gotten the economic model mastered a little bit, I'll start playing about with leases on a more serious level. I'll use it as an investment loan. Let's see if that will make me flourish or crash and burn like banks

Unless that limit scales properly, that would be unreasonably restrictive. For example, if I leased some galactic wonders, ships, upgrades, whatever in my current game, I could easily exceed 10k bc lease payments per turn. OH NOES!!! Too bad I'm already making 50k profit per turn, so 10k in payments is not a huge deal.